It is known to deposit one or more ferrous or non-ferrous metals over another ferrous or non-ferrous metal by a variety of techniques, including vapor deposition and electrochemical deposition. Other methods such as heat treatment, anodizing, are spraying, vacuum deposition, sputtering ion implantation, fusion, etc. are also known and have been used. Each of these is a commonly known process but some are fairly sophisticated, costly in terms of equipment and cost of application and most of all slow, especially in the case of relatively high volume manufacturing operations.
There are several patents in the prior art which disclose various metallizing and coating techniques and related processes. See, for example: U.S. Pat. No. 3,098,150 of July 1963 in the name of Inuoe, as well as the following identified by U.S. patent number, month and year of grant and inventors name; U.S. Pat. No. 3,200,234 of August 1965 by Crawford; U.S. Pat. No. 3,277,266 of October 1966 by Blaszkowski; U.S. Pat. No. 3,741,426 of June 1973 by Inoue; U.S. Pat. No. 4,348,281 of August 1982 by Inoue; U.S. Pat. No. 4,405,851 of September 1983 by Sheldon; U.S. Pat. No. 4,566,992 of January 1986 by Joseph; U.S. Pat. No. 4,764,654 of August 1988 by Joseph; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,840,711 of January 1989, also by Joseph.